hi,i'm a new member but have been checking out steve's site since he first built the original zen. (back then he had cool pics of a lifesize horn he built in one of his rooms, can't seem to find those on the site now...)

now i'm ready to get a SE84CS and am wondering whether i am required to run a preamp as well (i'm aware of steve's offerings) or can i hook it up directly to the source?

Concerning your question about a cd player vs. a transport?A cd player is one unit. One box. It contains both the transport and the DAC.

Now you may not know what a transport or a DAC are:

- Transport: This is basically the mechanism that spins the cd and reads the information off the cd. Unfortunately the information read off the cd is in the wrong language so to speak. It must be "translated" into the correct language so the amp can understand it. Here is where the DAC comes in.

- DAC: The DAC is the translator. It takes the information read by the transport and converts into a form that can be used by an amplifier. Much like a person can be spoken Spanish, then translate that into English, the DAC takes the Spanish(digital) info. and converts it to English(analog)

The select is a different animal with the CSP in front of it, in my system. Timbral naturalness, dynamics and "slam" are greatly improved. The upper register of a cd source is also far more tolerable, besides being much more natural.

Additionally, I find that with a preamp with gain, the volume pot on the select can be backed off to around 80% or so, where the select hits its most musical sweet spot, to my ear.

Every now and then I bypass the CSP as a reminder, and it's always the same answer.

If you were to hook up an SE84CS directly to a source, I'd recommend vinyl (course then you'd need a phono pre).

Open your player up and look at the top board. You will see a mass of grey wires and one white wire going to a plug which fits onto the board. Here you will see 2 tiny wires soldered off the board traces, these wires are the leads of the green caps. The other end of the cap wires go to a red and white wires which go straight to the tube stage.

Basically Steve has "tapped into" the signal and "stole" it so to speak but doesn't interupt the signal going to the stock outputs in the process. Kind of like sticking a tube into a gas tank and syphoning some gas out of the tank. The gas tank you are stealing out of is the DAC. Your mouth is the capacitor(green chicklet) which has the ability to suck the gas out and spit it into another hose directly into another engine(tube stage) The red and white wires are the hose you spit the gas into to feed the hot rod engine(tube)